Doos open at 6pm, event starts at 6.30pm. £6 plus fee. Tickets here.

A summer’s evening celebrating the best of Manchester writing.

Award-winning writers Abi Hynes, Adam Farrar, David Hartley, Isabelle Kenyon, Jo Howard, Reshma Ruia, Sarah Schofield, Steve Smythe, Tania Hershman and Zena Barrie will be reading from their latest works. There will be books to buy and an opportunity to chat to the authors.

Join us for words and wine at the Portico Library.

Author bios 

Zena Barrie

Zena Barrie is a festival producer and writer.  Her debut comic novel Your Friend Forever was published in 2021 and she is busy  working on the next one. Zena also works for Confingo Publishing, an Independent Publishing House based in Manchester.

Adam Farrer

Adam Farrer is an author and editor based in Manchester. He runs the creative nonfiction writer development organisation, The Real Story and was the inaugural Writer in Residence for Peel Park, Salford. His first book, Cold Fish Soup, won the NorthBound Book Award at the 2021 Northern Writers’ Awards and was published by Saraband in 2022. His second book, Broken Biscuits, will be published by Harper North in 2025. 

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Hinterland, Lunate and in the anthology Test Signal (Dead Ink Books/Bloomsbury). He has been a photo lab technician, a kitchen porter, the voice of an automated phone system, a lecturer, a ceramicist and he currently works at the University of Salford.

David Hartley

David Hartley is a writer of strange and unsettling stories. His collection Fauna was published by Fly on the Wall in 2021 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester, and in 2024 he was writer-in-residence at the Prima Vista Festival in Tartu, Estonia. He can be found lurking on Instagram at @DHartleyWriter.

Tania Hershman

A queer writer of odd things, Tania Hershman's second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022 and her debut hybrid novel, Go On, a "fictional-memoir-in-collage", was published by Broken Sleep Books in Nov 2022. Tania is editor of Fuel: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Feb 2023). Her poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, was joint winner of Live Canon's 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her hybrid particle-physics-inspired book 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear' was published by Guillemot Press in March 2020. Tania is also the author of a poetry collection, a poetry chapbook and three short story collections, and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. www.taniahershman.com

Jo Howard

Jo Howard is a poet and writer of Young Adult fiction. She lives in Manchester with her Spanish husband and three children. Their family is bilingual and Jo is a massive language geek! She teaches Spanish, French and German as a supply teacher in secondary schools around Manchester and has recently started learning Irish. She also runs a videography company with her husband, organising video shoots and writing scripts. She loves to sing at folk nights and she used to perform an Edith Piaf tribute act. Jo is a huge fan of spoken word and can often be found hosting events and performing stories and poems across the northwest.

Abi Hynes

Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester, UK. She wrote the first four episodes of historical audio drama DARK HARBOUR for Audible, and is currently developing many original dramas for TV. Her script LONG LOST was on the Brit List in 2022, and she has recently adapted ANNE OF GREEN GABLES for audio drama for Audible, starring Catherine O'Hara and Victor Garber and narrated by Sandra Oh.

As a playwright, her work has been staged in theatres across the UK, and she works regularly with LGBT History Month, bringing forgotten queer stories to life on stage. Her short stories have appeared in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies; she won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and her debut short story collection, Monstrous Longing, was published by Dahlia Books in October 2023.

Isabelle Kenyon

 Isabelle Kenyon is a Manchester writer and publisher of Fly on the Wall Press. She is the author of psychological thriller 'The Dark Within Them' and five chapbooks including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams). She has had work and articles published internationally and newspapers such as The Somerville Times and The Bookseller.

Reshma Ruia

Dr. Reshma Ruia is an award winning fiction writer and poet based in Manchester. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup, was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy’. Her poetry collection, A Dinner Party in the Home Counties won the 2019 Word Masala Award and her short story collection, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness, was shortlisted for the 2022 Eastern Eye ACTA Awards. Her new novel, Still Lives won the 2023 Diverse Book Readers’ Choice Award and is longlisted for the 2023 Peoples Book Award.

Reshma’s work has appeared in anthologies and journals, and commissioned by the BBC, University of Cumbria and Manchester Literature Festival. She is the co-founder of The Whole Kahani – a writers’ collective of British South Asian writers.  

Sarah Scholfield

Sarah Schofield is an award-winning writer of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in several Comma Press anthologies, Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt), Synaesthesia Magazine,  Morning Star, Woman’s Weekly, Hinterland and many others.  Sarah is a Creative Writing lecturer at Edge Hill University. Her debut collection Safely Gathered In was published by Comma Press in November 2021.

Stephen Smythe

Stephen Smythe is a Mancunian writer. Over the past few years he has completed an MA in Creative Writing at Salford University, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (flash fiction category) and longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. In 2022, he won the Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS competition and this year won the Strands International Flash Fiction competition. His debut book, ‘Looking for Love,’ 40 x forty word stories, was published in 2023 by The Red Ceilings Press. Later that year, his novella-in-flash, The Night Shift, was published by Flight of The Dragonfly Press. His third book, Seven Slightly Dangerous Sins, 49 x forty-nine word stories, written with Peg Mokrass, and published by The Red Ceilings Press, is due out this summer. When he’s not writing, he works in stadium security and car parks.